The Broad Reach Of The Beats

Generations Later, The Literary Rebels Still Have A Cause

October 24, 1999|By Connie Lauerman, Tribune Staff Writer.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were an unlikely trio. Ginsberg was a skinny, poetic 17-year-old freshman at Columbia University in December 1943, when a mutual friend introduced him to Burroughs, a genteel, decorous 29-year-old Harvard graduate with an affinity for the underbelly of life.

Two months later, Burroughs met Kerouac. The 21-year-old former football player had dropped out of Columbia, shipped out with the Merchant Marine and already written an unpublished novel.

FOR THE RECORD - Additional material published Oct. 24, 1999:Corrections and clarifications.In Sunday's preprinted Arts & Entertainment section, a chart about the legacies of the Beat writers stated that Philip Glass and Michael Stipe collaborated on a musical version of William Burroughs' "Wichita Vortex." In fact, "Wichita Vortex Sutra" was written by Allen Ginsberg, and it was Ginsberg and Glass who collaborated on that performance. The chart also misspelled Ginsberg's first name. The Tribune regrets the error.

By spring all three men were united by their passion for literature and commitment to openness and the expansion of artistic and spiritual consciousness.

By the late 1950s they emerged as the chief writers of what Kerouac would call the Beat Generation. (The term "beat" meant down and out, poor and exhausted, or, as Kerouac later amended, "beatific.")

They challenged the status quo in the midst of a buttoned-down Cold War culture that promoted consumerism and conformity. When their underground literary movement became news, they became emblems of a larger cultural and political shift under way in America.

At times they were reduced to a national punchline, and their camp followers were caricatured in the media as lazy, irresponsible "beatniks" with berets and bongo drums.

Literary critics and academicians deplored the writers as barbarians, but their influence on the culture has been profound. Throughout the 90s, a Beat revival has flourished as a younger generation discovered the literary renegades.

This year, a new documentary about the Beats by director Chuck Workman, "The Source," opens Nov. 12 at the Music Box Theatre. It combines interviews and archival footage with comments by cultural scholars and recitations of Beat writings by Johnny Depp, Dennis Hopper and John Turturro, actors who espouse a Beat sensibility.

This fall, 10 books related to the Beats will be published. Viking will bring out Kerouac's "Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings" and "Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1957-1969."

Why this continued interest?

"The idea of the Beats is appealing because these are people who actually believed in something," said Graham Caveney, who teaches a course on Beat literature at East Anglia University in Norwich, England, and has authored "Screaming with Joy" (Broadway Books), a new pictorial biography of Ginsberg.

"Those who take my course are jaded, cynical, postmodern, MTV kids who can't believe that only 40 years ago there was a group of writers who believed they really could change the world or explore their inner soulswithout irony. (Through the Beats) you can cling onto some notion of the possibilities of literature, of life, of nonconformity, of spontaneity that have been lost in the postmodern playpen of our contemporary world."

"The vilification actually helped the Beats," said James T. Jones, a professor of English at Southwestern Missouri State University and author of the just published "Jack Kerouac's Dulouz Legend" (Southern Illinois University Press), a study of Kerouac's highly personal cycle of novels.

"It clarified their position, and it built them an audience because people who liked them wanted to feel like they were outsiders too."

Douglas Brinkley, a history professor at the University of New Orleans, noted the role of the three, along with poet Gary Snyder, in raising ecological consciousness and introducing Westerners to Buddhism. Their candor and defiance of cultural taboos played a role in decriminalizing homosexuality and "blending down segregation, helping racial integration, multiculturalism," Brinkley said.

Kerouac's fluent, improvisational prose style was influenced more by the jazz that he loved than by literary tradition. "I want to be considered a jazz poet blowing a long blues in an afternoon jam session on a Sunday," he once wrote.

John Tytell, a professor of English at Queens College who just published "Paradise Outlaws" (Morrow), essays about the Beats illustrated with photographs by Mellon, noted that the Beats "had a tremendous influence on music. "Kerouac studied jazz, indigenous American music. He jammed with Lester Young and spent a lot of time listening to Charlie Parker. His ambition as a novelist was to capture that rhythm. He used the term `rock and roll' again and again in `On the Road.' "

Tytell said Burroughs also had a major influence on the postmodern novel. Burroughs' cut-up/fold-in method, a collage-like juxtaposition of words and phrases from other writers, was a way of repro-ducing the process of his own consciousness and freeing fiction from the confines of the conventional narrative. It also anticipated the computer age and the vertiginous possibilities of hypertext.